Flappy Golf Coasian Solution

During this past cross-country season, one of my teammates went back in his iCloud archive, and he came across a game by the name of Flappy Golf. He brought the game back to life, and soon enough, the whole team had Flappy Golf syndrome. Well, most of us at least. I for one was not a huge fan of the game for a couple of reasons. I think the game is extremely boring and super repetitive, but worst of all, everyone plays the game whenever we van out to a location to run. Whenever we van out, there are two options to choose from: a Mercedes van and an inferior Ford van (this will be important later). We generally leave fairly early in the morning meaning sometime around 6:30 or so. I am not awake at this point, but this game somehow gets the morning going for everyone else. Everyone that does play the game does so in the Mercedes van which happens to be the same van I like driving in the most. Due to the competitive nature of the team, there is a lot of yelling when people win, lose and talk trash. Waking up is hard enough and adding this to my morning makes it even harder to cope. I expressed my concerns, but my efforts were to no avail. I was in need of a Coasian solution in order to correct for the negative consumption externality.

The first step in doing so, I needed to figure out who exactly was liable. I took it up with my coach the next morning, and I thought for sure that he’d felt the same way about the game as me. I was very much wrong. He enjoyed the competitive nature of the game, and he enjoyed how everyone was so competitive with the game. Plus, at this point, he generally wakes up at 5 am every single morning meaning he is already wide awake. It had turned out that I was the one liable. There were only two things that I could do. I could have either figured out a way to get everyone on the team to stop through some sort of payment, or I needed to go to the inferior van. After asking around, I had learned that if I were to pay them, I would’ve need about 1 million dollars. I know this was exaggeration, but this was also them saying “we are not going to stop playing”. Since the marginal cost out-weighed the social marginal benefit, the Ford was the best option for me. Though I got away from the game, it came at the cost of riding in luxury. There is always next year.